"If the Heart Is Pierced"

The Communists had finished off Manchuria, prices were skyrocketing, and Dewey had lost the U.S. elections. At 40 to the dollar, the gold yuan had sunk in two weeks to a tenth of its original value. A wave of defeatism swept Nationalist China. Frail Wong Wen-hao, a geologist in private life, tried three times to resign as Premier, finally agreed to hang on until Chiang Kai-shek could find a successor.

Some U.S. officials on the spot shared the general feeling of despair. The embassy advised U.S. citizens to move not only out of North China, but even from the Nanking-Shanghai area. The U.S. Army began to ship out hundreds of wives and children of U.S. military personnel.

Spurred by fiery Liu Pu-ting, the Legislative Yuan's most outspoken critic of the government, 120 Nanking professors drafted open letters to Chiang and Communist Leader Mao Tse-tung. "People throughout the country," the professors wrote, "are praying for an early return of peace ... It is time to save the country's last remaining breath . . . Peace negotiations should be resumed for the formation of a multi-party coalition government . . ."

Mao Tse-tung appeared to be rejecting this solution in a statement last week that any "middle road" between Communism and capitalism was "utter hypocrisy and thorough bankruptcy." Chinese Communists have been crying for coalition; perhaps they now thought they would not have to stop at that halfway house to complete control.

Generalissimo Chiang, the only power still holding the Nationalist government together, had no illusions about his chances in a Communist-dominated coalition. Last week he conferred in Nanking with his top generals: Fu Tso-yi, whom he gave a completely free hand in the north, Chang Chih-chung, from the far northwest, and Pai Chung-hsi, from Hankow in Central China.

The generals' attention was focused on the area round Suchow, key to Nanking and the Yangtze Valley, now threatened by 185,000 Communist troops under General Chen Yi. As one minister put it: "Manchuria is a limb that has been amputated. The body can live, despite amputation. North China is another limb, and even that may be sacrificed. But Central China is the Nationalist heart--and if the heart is pierced the body dies."

To defend China's heart, the Gimo had disposed 400,000 troops in the flat, rich, water-laced plains around Suchow. At week's end, as his soldiers met the first shock of Chen Yi's armies, Chiang made one more effort to rally his people around him. At a Kuomintang meeting in Nanking, Chiang cried: "Our war against the Communist rebels is a national war, a continuation of the war of resistance against the Japanese . . . We must be ready for a struggle of eight years or more against the Communists . . . The government is determined to fight on to victory!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.